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October 28, 2010 - 11:03am  lindorff

by:

Dave Lindorff

So many things have been happening in the news this week--The NPR Williams firing, the latest Wikileaks leak, Bank mortgage fraud, DU weapons fallout in Fallujah, a sane person running for Texas School Board, the deepening crisis of joblessness -- I feel I should offer another perspective on them:

The Firing of Williams by NPR

Juan Williams was fired by NPR because of a comment he made on Fox-TV saying he was afraid getting on an airplane if he saw people in Arab Muslim garb seated among the passengers. But really, it should not a matter of his being racist or even un-PC, which is how the issue is being debated in the corporate media. Hell, if being racially insensitive were a bar to being a broadcast journalist in America, half the talking heads on air would be gone. No, Williams should have been fired simply for being stupid. No airline in recent memory has been hijacked or blown up by anyone dressed in Muslim garb. Even the famed 9-11 hijackers were clean-shaven men dressed in casual Western attire--button-down shirts and pressed pants.

Transportation Security Administration inspectors pay special attention to anyone going through security checkpoints who is wearing a hijab or some other Arab or Muslim clothing. Obviously, if someone were intending to sneak onto a plane with a bomb, a gun or a knife of some sort, or with accelerants in his underwear, with intent to do harm to the plane or its passengers, he or she would dress like the rest of the passengers.

Wikileaks' ongoing release of documents about America’s wars

Wikileaks, yet again, has shamed the American corporate media. Its latest dump of 400,000 leaked documents relating to the Iraq War and the criminal way it was conducted by the US military, especially with the massive killing of civilians and the operation of both US and US-trained Iraqi death squads and the deliberate, widespread use of torture, tell of things that could easily have been reported as they were happening. In fact, the stories were being reported--overseas. Those of us in the US alternative media, who bothered to read the foreign press, knew all about this stuff and wrote about it at length. Domestic sources were readily available too--for example returned veterans like those in the organization Iraq Veterans Against the War--who had first-hand knowledge. But the corporate media don't go to those sources, and has consistently preferred to pass along unremarked upon the lies offered by the Pentagon propaganda machine, or to publish the filings of its imbedded, and thus censored and sanitized, military reporters. So now we have the Times and other organizations reporting on documents released by Wikileaks--an organization that the Pentagon and the US intelligence apparatus is trying desperately to shut down by getting its banks to block its funds, and by using a dirty tricks campaign to try and tarnish the reputation of its founder, Julian Assange. (Indeed, many mainstream media outfits have devoted as much or more space to passing along the disinformation about Assange and his organization as to covering the information that Wikileaks is releasing.)

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